In a manufacturing industry such as an automobile industry where complicated products are produced in large quantities, quality control is one of the important issues. However, globalization and expansion in corporate activities lead to dispersion of databases used in the parts management and the quality control, and thus global quality control beyond the fields is becoming difficult.
Meanwhile, a product trouble leading to a recall with a tremendous cost is increasing due to complication of the product itself. In order to reduce such a cost, it is required to specify a cause of failure and to take necessary measures in an early stage of the failure becoming evident.
A method of controlling the quality in the manufacturing industry depends on how to manage a development process and a manufacturing process, and data related thereto. For example, in the automobile industry, data called a bill of materials is created during design and during production to be utilized for executing the processes or solving the quality problems. As for a bill of materials used during designing (E-BOM; Engineering Bill Of Materials) and a bill of materials used during production (M-BOM; Manufacturing BOM), however, different bills of materials are usually used since the objects thereof are different. Similarly, even for a bill of materials regarding the same production, databases are separately owned by plants and parts suppliers and there is no compatibility therebetween in many cases.
For example, since the bill of materials used during designing includes only design data of the parts, what can be said is that a cause of failure may be the design of a specific part. When an impact of the failure such as a recall is investigated from this bill of materials, all of the products produced according to its design will correspond thereto. Since the number of the impacted products are not able to be narrowed down, the recall is very expensive
Accordingly, if there are control data, such as parts data in production, for indicating that products of a certain lot (or a unique product serial number) use parts of a certain specified lot, it is possible to say that, for example, only parts of a specific lot are the cause of the trouble. This is superior to the bill of materials during designing as a quality control method since products using only the specific lot may be a recall target.
However, since parts are produced in different plants, or come from external suppliers, parts whose data may not be accessed, more detailed data, such as the lot or the like, than the supplier's name may not be obtained. In order to perform the quality control, the information infrastructure should be improved in a certain way to thereby allow the dispersed quality control data to be systematically accessed and the data to be traced.
The traces of such an individual product level and a parts lot level are effective, but if there is a large amount of parts data in dispersed data sources, it is not realistic to access and trace all of the data. Particularly, when the trouble is caused not by a single part but by a combination of a plurality of parts, it is difficult to know whether or not the combination is truly problematic by collecting only a lot number of individual parts which can be traced from the known failed product.